Excerpt: On a secondary level, Donald Trump is not a conservative. He is in reality, per his own pronouncements, a Progressive at home with populist rhetoric. He never discusses the Constitution or limiting the leviathan that is the federal government, which is choking the life out of this nation. Rather he intends to make government work “better” as he expands the imperial presidency begun by Barack Obama. His economic policies of high tariffs, quasi-central planning and expanded social spending will further cripple the nation and continue the downward spiral in the standard of living for all, but a select few, Americans. If he were to win the presidency, which is extremely unlikely considering his overwhelming negatives, conservatism would be relegated to the wilderness. The Republican Party will no longer be a home to conservatism as the party will assume the long discredited mantle of progressive populism and protectionism.There are those that will say if I do not vote for Trump, if he is the nominee, then I am ceding the election to the Democratic Party nominee. I have heard that argument many times before and I dutifully responded by voting for: Gerald Ford in 1976, Bob Dole in 1996, John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012, all of whom were middle of the road moderates. (Another common thread among all these men-- they lost their elections.) Despite my misgivings regarding all these candidates and their political leanings and policies, they were men of character and did not posses any authoritarian traits. If the only objection I had to Trump was policy-driven then I would vote, albeit very reluctantly, for him despite his progressive pedigree in order to try and prevent Hillary or any Democrat from winning the presidency.

Excerpt: Trump keeps saying that unlike his rivals, he’s paying for his own presidential campaign, but that’s largely false. At the start of his campaign, he loaned his political operation $1.8 million. As of Oct. 1, he had given his campaign an additional $104,829.27 — but he had also received $3.9 million from donors, which accounted for the vast majority of the $5.8 million his campaign had taken in by then. His campaign websitefeatures a prominent “donate” button on its homepage. Trump has spent $5.4 million, and interestingly, about one-quarter of his spending has gone to Trump-owned entities (mainly his private jet company).

Excerpt: "I have to say a lot of people have been asking this question. No, really. A lot of people come up to me, and they ask me. They say, 'What's 2+2'? And I tell them, look, we know what 2+2 is. We've had almost eight years of the worst kind of math you can imagine. Oh, my God, I can't believe it. Addition and subtraction of the 1s the 2s and the 3s. It's terrible. It's just terrible. Look, if you want to know what 2+2 is, do you want to know what 2+2 is? I'll tell you. First of all the number 2, by the way, I love the number 2. It's probably my favorite number, no it is my favorite number. You know what, it's probably more like the number two but with a lot of zeros behind it. A lot. If I'm being honest, I mean, if I'm being honest. I like a lot of zeros. Except for Marco Rubio, now he's a zero that I don't like. Though, I probably shouldn't say that. He's a nice guy, but he's like, '10101000101,' on and on, like that. He's like a computer! You know what I mean? He's like a computer. I don't know. I mean, you know. So, we have all these numbers, and we can add them and subtract them and add them. TIMES them even. Did you know that? We can times them OR divide them, they don't tell you that, and I'll tell you, no one is better at the order of operations than me. You wouldn't believe it. So, we're gonna be the best on 2+2, believe me."

Excerpt: Outside the whir of daily, saturation coverage of Donald Trump, various investigative reporters across the mediascape toil to excavate the mogul’s history of grand proclamations and less-grand deeds. There have been examinations of his wealth, his brand, his properties and so on. One of the figures to emerge from years of investigation is Felix Sater. A Russian emigre, Sater ran into trouble with the law twice before becoming a “senior advisor” to Trump himself. The first came when Sater was convicted of first-degree assault for a 1991 incident in which he feuded with a man at El Rio Grande restaurant in Manhattan.Donald Trump will (almost certainly) never be elected president. Here’s why. By Greg Sargent

Not to mention that many conservatives will not vote for a lifelong liberal with a history of shady dealings: Donald Trump will (almost certainly) never be elected president

Excerpt: Many Democrats and nonpartisan observers see this as probably the only plausible (if that’s even the right word for it) path for Trump, who might do this mainly by running up huge numbers among white voters — particularly blue collar whites. But a new examination of the demographics and projected voting patterns in some of the key Rust Belt states underscores just how unlikely this really is. To succeed, this analysis finds, Trump would likely have to improve on Mitt Romney’s advantage over Barack Obama among blue collar whites by double digit margins, which is an astronomically high bar — in almost all of these states.

Excerpt: Executive summary: Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi in 2013 was considering joining in a lawsuit against TrumpUniversity. Shortly thereafter, a check for $25,000 was sent to Bondi’s campaign political action committee “And Justice For All” by the Trump Foundation. AG Bondi (who has since endorsed Trump) ended up not joining in on the TrumpUniversity lawsuit. So far, so bad: but here’s the wrinkle: the left-wing government transparency group CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) today noted that the Trump Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and is thus not permitted to make campaign contributions*. Nobody noticed at the time because while the Trump Foundation reported the contribution properly on Florida campaign finance disclosure forms, it reported it to the IRS as a contribution to “Justice For All,” which is a non-political, pro-life group out of Kansas. Justice for All has confirmed that they never got that money; CREW has now lodged a formal complaint with the IRS.

Excerpt: As I reported yesterday, at various times Donald Trump has had hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from Citibank and Goldman, some of which have been repaid, some of which were discharged in bankruptcy when Trump’s AltanticCity casino went belly up. By Trump’s own standard, Citibank and Goldman own him, too. But of course, it’s much worse than that for Trump. As a twitter user pointed out, according to Trump’s most recent financial disclosures, he has hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from virtually every bank on Wall Street. Here is a copy of the form.

Excerpt: That means that it can be difficult to convince voters of something a bit complicated, something that requires them to undo their default assumptions. And one of those assumptions is that candidates from the same party are going to be partners.

Split-ticket voting (choosing one party's candidate for president and a different party's candidate for lower offices) has declined in recent years, which is understandable in an era of partisan polarization and tight party unity. Half a century ago, when both parties contained a relatively broad ideological spectrum — for instance, the Democratic Party had both Northern liberals and Southern conservatives — it made more sense to view an individual senator or congressman as a free agent who might act independently of his or her party. But today, most important votes break firmly along partisan lines, which means that your senator is probably not going to surprise you, or the president, with anything he or she does.

Donald Trump Displays The Perils Of Populism. Donald Trump's anti-intellectual populism shows why Republicans shouldn't try to be the party of the regular guys against the eggheads. By Robert Tracinski

Excerpt: Take the news that John Kasich is being funded by George Soros, a billionaire notorious for bankrolling far-left institutions, and combine that with the fact that it was Bill Clinton who encouraged Donald Trump to run for president, plus the way Trump has dominated the race with billions of dollars of free media donated by the press corps. It’s looking like this is the year when the Left — sensing that Republicans had a dangerously strong roster of candidates — decided it was going to take over the Republican nominating process. Then again, the real story isn’t that lefties decided to derail our primaries. The story is that we let them do it. It’s no use trying to shift the blame to others, because there’s plenty to go around. The Trump phenomenon is too big and has snared too many right-leaning figures, particularly in the broadcast media, that we have to take responsibility for it ourselves.

WaPo Fact Checker: All of Donald Trump’s Four-Pinocchio ratings, in one place

Excerpt: In fact, only one Republican member of the Senate, Ben Sasse (Neb.), has said he will not vote for Trump. I will follow him into battle. The rest of the Senate is mute, frozen in terror, their spines turning to Jell-O as Trump approaches the number of delegates needed for the nomination. Across Washington and elsewhere, job-famished Republicans — deprived of key positions for the eight years of the Obama presidency — are starting to see some virtue in Trump. Of course, many in the foreign policy arena have in fact denounced him, but Trump has no idea who they are anyway. As we now know, these things can be negotiated.

Excerpt: I get the guy is licking his wounds and hurt over his race and probably even feeling betrayed by his campaign and lied to. But the guy who most closely connects to millennials on the campaign trail needs to stop acting like one and man up. If Marco Rubio is really and truly committed to stopping Trump and is really and truly committed to lifting the United States away from both the Obama agenda and the path of anger, then he needs to come on out for Ted Cruz and campaign with the guy. It is the only way to stop Donald Trump. I absolutely believe Rubio would help Cruz, could unite the party, and be the guy so many of us know he can be.

Excerpt: Aides to Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump said this week that his charitable foundation made a mistake when it donated $25,000 to a political committee backing Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a potential violation of federal rules prohibiting charities from aiding political candidates. The Donald J. Trump Foundation compounded the error by not listing its 2013 gift to the pro-Bondi group, And Justice for All, in its filings with the IRS that year, the aides said. The charity listed a $25,000 donation to an unrelated group with a similar name, Justice for All. But that group, a Wichita-based nonprofit, said it never received any money from the foundation. ... Bondi, a Republican who was preparing for her 2014 reelection campaign, never took action against TrumpUniversity. When questions arose at the time, the group and Trump defended the donation. The treasurer of the pro-Bondi And Justice for All, Nancy Watkins, told the Tampa Bay Times at the time that the group was “comfortable with the propriety of the contribution from the Trump Foundation.” Trump told the paper then that Bondi “is a fabulous representative of the people — Florida is lucky to have her.”

Excerpt: watchdog group is alleging that the Donald J. Trump Foundation did not disclose a contribution to a political organization associated with the Florida attorney general while her office was looking into joining a lawsuit regarding TrumpUniversity. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) charged in a complaint Monday that the foundation illegally gave $25,000 to And Justice for All, a group linked to Pam Bondi, who endorsed Trump earlier this month.

The Media is About to Blow the Lid Off of Trump’s Mafia Ties. By Leon H. Wolf

Excerpt: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has stated his intention to build a wall along the US-Mexican border and that Mexico could be made to pay for it. Mexico, of course, disagrees.2 Of course we could make Mexico pay for it. The letter for that runs: Dear Mexico: You have one month to stop illegal immigration through your border with us, whether originating in Mexico or from elsewhere. If you fail to do so to our satisfaction we will consider your negligence to be an act of war, and will mobilize our armed forces to invade. Realistically, you have even less of a chance – much less – now than you did in 1846-1847. If we must invade, you can assume we’re going to exterminate your ruling class, nailing them up along Highway 45 from Ciudad Juarez to Mexico City. Moreover, we’ll empty our prisons for sociopaths to pull a Lidice on any town which resists us in the slightest. Then we’ll annex you entirely, take your oil, sell your public lands to our ranchers, and sell your wives and daughters as slaves, all to defray the cost of the invasion and occupation. We will then, with complete disregard to the cost to you in blood, proceed to restructure Mexico to suit ourselves to a T. Sincerely, The Gringos. Now, instead of engaging in bizarre fantasy, let’s be serious. We’re not going to do or even threaten anything like that. In the history of US-Mexican relations, Mexico is far more the offended than the offending party. They know it. We know it. We’ve felt guilty about it all along, many of us. Indeed, Ulysses Grant said of our invasion and large scale annexation, “For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” (Tom Kratman is a retired USA LtCol, an occasional contributor to this blog, and an outstand author of military science fiction, including the A Desert Called Peace series. http://www.amazon.com/Desert-Called-Peace-Carrera-Book-ebook/dp/B00B5HJOFY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1426715332&sr=8-1&keywords=Peace+Kratman I expect that in 20 years they will move his novel Caliphate to the history section. ~Bob)

Must read: Ten Commandments for Our Next President. A good rule of thumb is to look at what Obama has done, and then do the opposite. By Victor Davis Hanson

Excerpt: Defense Secretary Ash Carter grabbed headlines last week when he announced that President Obama would soon nominate the first woman to head a major U.S. military Northern combatant command. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

According to the Marine Corps Times, female officers and staff non-commissioned officers (NCOs) will soon be assigned to infantry units in order to “begin building the cadre of women leaders,” to support female enlisted Marines. Males in both ranking and subordinate positions are supposed to accept female leadership that has not completed the Infantry Officer Course (IOC) because they will be serving in support roles: These female Marines or sailors will help male infantrymen adjust to the changes in their units before female grunts join their battalions, said Col. Anne Weinberg, deputy director of manpower integration. (Another great column from a former woman Marine with service in a combat zone. Just using facts, logic, experience, common sense, all that stuff that no longer even shows up on the screen of the idiot politicians and bureaucrats who are running and ruining things. Heaven help us, and we can pray that next January there will be someone in the Oval Office who will start off reversing this insane PC crap. --Del)

Excerpt: The Obama administration is moving toward what could be a dangerous showdown with China over the South China Sea. The confrontation has been building for the past three years, as China has constructed artificial islands off its southern coast and installed missiles and radar in disputed waters, despite U.S. warnings. It could come to a head this spring, when an arbitration panel in The Hague is expected to rule that China is making “excessive” claims about its maritime sovereignty. What makes this dispute so explosive is that it pits an American president who needs to affirm his credibility as a strong leader against a risk-taking Chinese president who has shown disregard for U.S. military power and who faces potent political enemies at home. “This isn’t Pearl Harbor, but if people on all sides aren’t careful, it could be ‘The Guns of August,’ ” says Kurt Campbell, former assistant secretary of state for Asia, referring to the chain of miscalculations that led to World War I. The administration, he says, is facing “another red line moment where it has to figure out how to carry through on past warnings.”

Excerpt: No member of the Supreme Court dissented from today's per curiam opinion inCaetano v. Massachusetts. However, Justice Sameuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote a separate concurring opinion in which he left little doubt that if it were up to him (and Thomas), the state's actions would have been ruled flatly unconstitutional.

"The Commonwealth of Massachusetts was either unable or unwilling to do what was necessary to protect Jaime Caetano, so she was forced to protect herself," Alito wrote. "To make matters worse, the Commonwealth chose to deploy its prosecutorial resources to prosecute and convict her of a criminal offense for arming herself with a nonlethal weapon that may well have saved her life. The Supreme Judicial Court then affirmed her conviction on the flimsiest of grounds." According to Alito, "if the fundamental right of self-defense does not protect Caetano, then the safety of all Americans is left to the mercy of state authorities who may be more concerned about disarming people than about keeping them safe."

Excerpt: The irony is that, compared with the male politicians of an earlier generation, today’s macho politicians are not truly manly at all. True, Trump was sent to a military school (after all other educational options had failed). But he has never seen action. Indeed, he has served his country less to date than the lowliest grunt. In that sense, there is something deeply phony about his machismo. A man who has to reassure the world about the size of his genitals is not macho; he is just insecure. The good news is that a new generation is on its way into politics: Americans who served their country in Afghanistan and Iraq, a remarkable number of whom are now going into public life, seeking and winning election to state legislatures and (step forward Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton) Congress.

Excerpt: Much is made of the fact that liberals and conservatives see racial issues differently, which they do. But these differences have too often been seen as simply those on the right being racist and those on the left not. You can cherry-pick the evidence to reach that conclusion. But you can also cherry-pick the evidence to reach the opposite conclusion. During the heyday of the Progressive movement in the early 20th century, people on the left were in the forefront of those promoting doctrines of innate, genetic inferiority of not only blacks but also of people from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, as compared to people from Western Europe. Liberals today tend to either glide over the undeniable racism of Progressive President Woodrow Wilson or else treat it as an anomaly of some sort. But racism on the left at that time was not an anomaly, either for President Wilson or for numerous other stalwarts of the Progressive movement.

Excerpt: A Department of Veterans Affairs employee in Puerto Rico was fired after being arrested for armed robbery, but her union quickly got her reinstated — despite a guilty plea — by pointing out that management’s labor relations negotiator is a registered sex offender, and the hospital’s director was once arrested and found with painkiller drugs. The woman missed work while sitting in jail but was reinstated in March with back pay. The incident illustrates how union-backed civil service rules that rely on precedent, coupled with VA’s past failures to discipline problem employees, hamstring the department’s efforts to keep convicted criminals on its payroll. (Even FDR was against civil service unions, for damn good reasons. But they got set up anyhow, and immediately began to gain power and influence and now they are too often the tail that wags the dog, and we mere citizens and taxpayers have nothing to say about anything they do, including incompetence, corruption, and even criminal activity. This is beyond nuts. But our elected representatives in Congress don't have the will or the cojones to do what they should be doing, taking on the problem and, as difficult and messy as the fight would be, cutting back on the power of the unions and making their members answerable for their performance and behaviors. It's a dereliction of duty of the worst kind. --Del)

Excerpt: In all fairness, we Texans have had a sizeable advantage over the rest of the country because we have followed Ted Cruz’s life and career for many years. What makes many of us Texans value Ted Cruz so highly is because of his proven record to stand for the Constitution even if it means alienating other people. (Another time when he went against the weight of the system and the people in power in his own Party to do what was right. Yeah, lots of people don't like him because he acts like that. I have the reverse reaction, the guy who will go against the system and his friends to do what's right is the one I want running things. --Del)

Excerpt: In this “history class where dates don’t seem to matter much,” tomorrow’s topic was “what we should do in the face of a witch hunt.” The teacher prompted that discussion by posing a question worthy of Socrates: “Should you sit there with your finger up your nose?” In case you’re thinking this was the kind of class reformers hoped to replace, guess again. According to promoters, while this wasn’t yet a “typical middle-school American history class,” it “wouldn’t be atypical in a high school, especially an Advanced Placement class.” This explains a lot about the state of the nation’s high schools, why American students don’t know much history, and why Advanced Placement’s reputation is on the skids. (Wonder if the teacher mentioned that our moderate Saudi allies still execute "witches"? ~Bob)

Religion of Peace News

At least 31 killed in terror attacks at Brussels airport, Metro station

Now we can expect stage two: The handwringing by liberals that there will be an anti-Muslim backlash (which never seems to happen). Just a reminder that of hate crimes based on religion, 60.3% are against Jews, while just 13.7% are against Muslims. Most hate crimes recorded by the FBI are based on race, against blacks. ~Bob

Excerpt: Islamic State uses social media to claim responsibility for bombings this morning at Brussels airport and a subway station that killed at least 31 people and wounded more than 180. Complete coverage now and throughout the day on Fox News and FoxNews.com.

Brussels Terror Attacks Bring Guerrilla War to the Heart of Europe: Coordinated attacks on Brussels this morning may signal the start of an ISIS-led guerrilla warfare campaign in the West.

Excerpt: As explosions rocked the airport and the metro in Brussels this morning, fears grew that the threat of terrorism is morphing into the threat of guerrilla war in Europe.

The attacks, which killed more than 20 people, came four days after the arrest in Brussels of Salah Abdeslam, a member of the terrorist cell that attacked Paris cafés, a sports stadium, and a concert hall in November, slaughtering 130 people. On Sunday, the Belgian foreign minister warned that Abdeslam was planning a new attack. (I knew, many of us knew, that more was coming, it only took the simple recognition of the murderous maniacs that have organized in the past years to know what they would be doing, anywhere and everywhere they can. But still we have the PC insanity that says we cannot say "radical Islam", we cannot associate any part of the religion with the terrorist violence against innocents. However, as time goes on and the body count rises, slowly people are being forced to face the tragic and dangerous facts. Civilization may not be at war with ISIS and the other forms of radical Islam, but they are most definitely at war with civilization. And you can only win a war when you understand you are in it, and start taking the steps necessary to wipe out or crush your enemy. The Europeans are waking up now, those bomb blasts are loud enough, and the cries of the wounded, the tears of the families of the dead, add up so the ears cannot shut them out anymore. More steps will be taken, and yes, that means that some innocent Muslims will be affected, but in war the innocents are always affected. There is no help for that, since none of us has perfect knowledge, and to not act at all is to give victory to the killers. This will be a long war, and cannot come to even a major slowdown until somehow nations are motivated enough to come together and really wipe out ISIS, doing whatever it takes for that to happen. So far there's little sign of such a joint effort and real determination coming together, but maybe we'll start moving in that direction. I sure hope so, because the sooner we do, the sooner innocents will stop dying. --Del)

But no known Terror links! 2 Brothers Identified as Brussels Attackers; 3rd Suspect Is Sought

Excerpt: Ibrahim el-Bakraoui was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2010 for shooting at police officers after the attempted robbery of a currency exchange office. In 2011, Khalid el-Bakraoui was convicted on charges of attempted carjacking; at the time of his arrest, he had been in possession of assault rifles. (Sentenced to nine years in 2010, six years ago...)

Excerpt: “The Kaka’is had earlier suffered several massacres at the hands of jihadis in Iraq.” Why do jihadis persistently miss the peaceful, tolerant teachings of Islam that are so blazingly obvious to people such as John Kerry, David Cameron, Pope Francis and other learned Islamic scholars? Will any of them or the other learned Islamic scholars who assure us that Islam is peaceful at its core kindly send a delegation to Raqqa to explain to the caliph al-Baghdadi how he is misunderstanding Islam? No? Why not?

US, UK governments knew where girls kidnapped by Boko Haram were, but no one tried to rescue them